It’s clear that the invisible conflict that my friend Josh Bornstein has been saying is the real power keg – Yemen – has finally come to haunt the US. Our proxy war – with the US funding the Yemeni government and Iran funding local Al Qaeda rebels – has once again spilled into the open with a group claiming retaliation for a war that most Americans were not aware we were fighting.
What I find interesting is the nature of the security failure on the plane and how it shows that we still don’t have systems that appropriately leverage airport security personal. The suspect was actually on the terror suspicion list – a 550,000 person list – but not the 4,000 person no-fly list or the 14,000 person “enhanced screening before being allowed to fly” list. Thus, by binary logic, he was allowed to fly. But he also had no luggage and a one-way ticket that was bought with cash. It’s clear that there is no system – at least no well functioning system – for airport personal to enter this other, obviously relevant data which then should lead at very least to additional screening procedures. Such a system would not be hard to implement - we define a certain set of suspicious activities on check-in; airport personal would specify if a person was doing one of these suspicious activities into a webpage; the webpage would do a back-end look up to see whether there saw an outstanding warrant or the passenger was on the terror suspicious list and an alert would pop back to the airport personal telling them to give additional security screenings.
Given that anyone can really get on the 550,000 person terror suspect if some neighbor happens to snitch on them, we don’t really want a system where any airport personal can see this data but clearly we do want a system wherein the suspicions of the airport personnel and the wider government databases can be combined in real-time with the occasional resulting alert that says “Sorry but this person needs to be stripped searched before flying.” Such a system would not be hard to implement and would have stopped Abdulmutallab.
It’s clear that the invisible conflict that my friend Josh Bornstein has been saying is the real power keg – Yemen – has finally come to haunt the US. Our proxy war – with the US funding the Yemeni government and Iran funding local Al Qaeda rebels – has once again spilled into the open with a group claiming retaliation for a war that most Americans were not aware we were fighting.
What I find interesting is the nature of the security failure on the plane and how it shows that we still don’t have systems that appropriately leverage airport security personal. The suspect was actually on the terror suspicion list – a 550,000 person list – but not the 4,000 person no-fly list or the 14,000 person “enhanced screening before being allowed to fly” list. Thus, by binary logic, he was allowed to fly. But he also had no luggage and a one-way ticket that was bought with cash. It’s clear that there is no system – at least no well functioning system – for airport personal to enter this other, obviously relevant data which then should lead at very least to additional screening procedures. Such a system would not be hard to implement - we define a certain set of suspicious activities on check-in; airport personal would specify if a person was doing one of these suspicious activities into a webpage; the webpage would do a back-end look up to see whether there saw an outstanding warrant or the passenger was on the terror suspicious list and an alert would pop back to the airport personal telling them to give additional security screenings.
Given that anyone can really get on the 550,000 person terror suspect if some neighbor happens to snitch on them, we don’t really want a system where any airport personal can see this data but clearly we do want a system wherein the suspicions of the airport personnel and the wider government databases can be combined in real-time with the occasional resulting alert that says “Sorry but this person needs to be stripped searched before flying.” Such a system would not be hard to implement and would have stopped Abdulmutallab.
